Hutton "Red" Gibson is the son of businessman John Hutton Gibson and Australian opera singer Eva Mylott. Gibson's place of birth has been reported as either Montclair, New Jersey or Peekskill, New York. Ancestry of Mel Gibson He was raised in Chicago, Illinois. Gibson's mother died when he was two years old and his father died when he was fifteen. Gibson supported his younger brother Alexis, who died in his early twenties. Gibson graduated from high school early, at age 15, and ranked third in his class.

According to Wensley Clarkson's biography of Mel Gibson, Gibson studied for the priesthood in a Chicago seminary of the Society of the Divine Word but left disgusted with the modernist theological doctrines taught there. However, in 2003 Gibson stated that his actual reason for leaving was because he did not want to be sent to New Guinea or the Philippines as a missionary. Instead, he found work with Western Union and with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He also contributed to and edited the newsletter "The Pointer" while he worked in Wisconsin for the CCC from 1938—1939.

Gibson served as a first lieutenant in the Pacific Theater during World War II after his September 30, 1941, graduation from the U.S. Army Signal Corps OCS program at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He was wounded by Japanese fire in action at the Battle of Guadalcanal and sent to a nursing home in 1944.

Gibson married Irish-born Anne Reilly on May 1, 1944, at the Catholic parish church of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Brooklyn, New York. They had ten children and adopted another one after their arrival in Australia. As of 2003, Gibson had 48 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. His wife died in December 1990 and in 2001 he married a woman named Joy. As of 2007, he resided in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania after moving from Australia to Houston, Texas in 1999, and to Summersville, West Virginia in 2003.

In the 1960s Gibson worked for New York Central Railroad. In the early morning hours of December 11, 1964 he slipped off a steel platform covered in oil and snow and injured his back. A work injury lawsuit followed and it finally went to court on February 7, 1968. Seven days later, Gibson was awarded $145,000 by the jury. Gibson paid his debts and attorney's fees and that year relocated his family, first to Ireland, then to Australia. Hutton Gibson said in 2003 that the move to his mother's native country was undertaken because he believed the Australian military would reject his oldest son for the Australian Vietnam War draft, unlike the American military. Because of his back injuries, Gibson sought retraining in a new career. He was encouraged to become a computer programmer after IQ testing placed him in the genius range.

After the promulgation of the reformed liturgy of Paul VI, the Gibson family home in Sydney, Australia was used as a temporary chapel where the Tridentine Mass was offered. Gibson also reportedly used the house to store statues and altar relics which had been discarded by parishes. Gibson was ousted as secretary of the Latin Mass Society of Australia after becoming increasingly vocal about the See of Peter actually being vacant due to John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council, and subsequent popes being heretics.

In 1968, Gibson appeared on the Art Fleming-hosted version of the game show Jeopardy! as "...Red Gibson, a railroad brakeman from South Ozone Park, New York". Gibson won $4,680 and retired undefeated after five shows, per the show's rules then in force. He was invited back to appear in the 1968 Tournament of Champions, where he became the year's grand champion, winning slightly over one thousand dollars more, as well as a two-person cruise to the West Indies. Art Fleming noted on the October 18, 1968, episode that the Jeopardy! staff had had difficulty informing Gibson about his invitation because Gibson had relocated his family to Tipperary, Ireland.

Gibson later participated in numerous Australian quiz shows, including Big Nine with Athol Guy and Ford Superquiz with Patti Newton. In 1986, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Gibson had recently won $100,000 and an automobile in a TV quiz program.

Gibson is an outspoken critic of the modern post-conciliar Catholic Church and is a proponent of various conspiracy theories. He disseminates his views in a quarterly newsletter called The War is Now! and has self-published three collections of these periodicals: Is the Pope Catholic?, The Enemy is Here!, and The Enemy is Still Here!

Gibson believes that the Second Vatican Council introduced explicitly heretical and forbidden doctrines into the Catholic Church in order to destroy it from within. He also holds that every pope elected since John XXIII, inclusively, has been an anti-pope or illegitimate claimant to the papacy. This doctrine is called "Sedevacantism", from the Latin words Sede ("seat") and vacante ("vacant"), and affirms that the Pope's seat is effectively vacant because those occupying it do not do so legitimately.

Gibson has been especially critical of the late Pope John Paul II, whom he once described as "Garrulous Karolus the Koran Kisser". His allegation that the Pope kissed the Qur'an is corroborated by a FIDES News Service report of June 1, 1999, which quotes the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Raphael I, as having confirmed to the news service that he was personally present when John Paul II kissed the text sacred to Muslims:

Gibson has also used his newsletter to argue against Feeneyism.

At the January 2004 We The People conference, Gibson advocated that the states secede from the Federal government of the United States and that the United States public debt be abolished.

Gibson garnered widespread outrage when remarks questioning how the Nazis could have disposed of six million bodies during the Holocaust were printed in a March 2003 New York Times Magazine article.

In his interview for the article, he dismissed historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated: "Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," he said. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?"

Across the table during the interview, his wife, Joye, who had been quiet for most of the visit, suddenly looked up and "cheerfully piped in 'There weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe,'"

"Anyway, there were more after the war than before", Hutton Gibson added.

"The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an arrangement between Hitler and 'financiers' to move Jews out of Germany. Hitler 'had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs,' he said".

Gibson was further quoted as saying the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews" and that the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by remote control: "Hutton flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks. 'Anybody can put out a passenger list,' he said". Gibson publicly questioned the extent of the Holocaust. One week before Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was released in American film theaters, he told radio talk show host Steve Feuerstein that the Holocaust was fabricated and "mostly fictional". He said that the Jews had simply emigrated to other countries rather than having been killed, a view which some observers described as Holocaust denial. He claimed that census statistics prove there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before. Gibson said that certain Jews advocate a global religion and one world government. Gibson’s family claimed that Steve Feuerstein misrepresented himself when he called Gibson and never revealed that he was being taped with the intent to broadcast his comments on his show, Speak Your Piece.

In the early 1990s, Gibson and Tom Costello hosted a video called Catholics, Where Has Our Church Gone? which is critical of the changes made to the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council and espouses the Siri Thesis that in 1958, after the death of Pope Pius XII, the man originally elected pope was not Angelo Roncalli, but another cardinal, "probably Cardinal Siri of Genoa" (a staunch conservative candidate and first papabile). Gibson stated that the white smoke which emanated from a chimney in the Sistine Chapel to announce a new pope's election was done in error; black smoke signifying that the papacy was still vacant was quickly created and the public was not informed of the reason for the initial white smoke. A still photograph of a newspaper story about this event is shown. "Had our church gone up in smoke"? asked Gibson. He stated that the new pope was forced to resign under duress and two days later, the "modernist Roncalli" was elected pope and took the name "John XXIII". In 1962, Roncalli, as Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council. In 2006, Hutton Gibson reversed his position on the Siri Thesis, asserting that this theory was based on a mistranslation of an article written on October 27, 1958 by Silvio Negro for the evening edition of the Milan-based Corriere della Sera. A similar event also happened in 1939; in that case a confusing mixture of white and black smoke emanated from the Sistine Chapel chimney. In a note to Vatican Radio, the secretary of the Papal conclave at the time, a monsignor named Santoro said that a new pope, Eugenio Pacelli, had been properly elected regardless of the color of the smoke. Pacelli took the name Pius XII.

Gibson endorsed Ron Paul for President in the 2008 United States Presidential Election. In January 2010, he made an appearance on the far-right-wing radio show, The Political Cesspool, to promote his views. In August 2010, he made another appearance on The Political Cesspool during which he made a widely-discussed allegation that Pope Benedict XVI is "homosexual" and that "half the people in the Vatican are queer".

In 2006 Gibson's foundation, The World Faith Foundation of California which is funded by Mel Gibson, purchased an existing church structure in Unity, Pennsylvania, and established there a Tridentine sedevacantist congregation called St. Michael the Archangel Roman Catholic Chapel. The Reverend Leonard Bealko, purportedly a former Roman Catholic priest who had left the church voluntarily in 1986, was appointed pastor. By mid-2007 Gibson and his fellow congregants had dismissed Bealko and dissolved the congregation amid charges that Bealko had misrepresented his credentials and mishandled finances.